As if having predicted exactly how she would feel upon reading the notes, the very next page noted the reason for her unannounced use of this procedure. Zelsys described herself as feeling like she was inside a too-tight glove, like her own skin was too small, as if every iota of her body itched like a healing wound. There was also the matter of her lungs.
Who would’ve thought that rapid mutations had consequences. Rather than wrestle with it for months on end, I’ve come to an agreement with my Primordial Self. I will simply solve the issue of my lungs all at once. Riding the end of that epiphany ought to make things easier.
Given these circumstances, it made complete sense to go forward with it earlier than planned. After all, the bath was an extremified body cultivation procedure. A mutant chimera grafted together from similar recipes recorded in the sect’s own texts as well as those provided by Strolvath, specifically the Burning Man Manuscript fragment and the Blazing-black Destruction Scripture. Zefaris wasn’t familiar with the specifics, but she knew it had involved a combination of Ozmir’s expertise and the work of the sect’s most skilled alchemists.
Now that she read it over, she understood why it seemed so disproportionately simple: Because it was. It was the opposite of a recipe that tried to achieve a great effect with a complex blend of wildly variable ingredients. This one just sought to get the most out of the blood of a Dragon Descendant in the most direct way possible, without instilling any draconic traits into the subject or exciting ones that might already be present. Several working names were written out, from the simple to the extravagant:
DRAGON’S BLOOD BODY TRANSFORMATION BATH
TRUE BODY TRANSFORMATION BATH
HYBRID METHOD FLESH REBIRTH
ANTEDILUVIAN BLOOD ORIGIN REFINEMENT
DRAGONSLAYER BAPTISM
The last one was underlined.
Zefaris sat down, reading further. The bath’s possible effects and issues were extensive, gathered from both source texts and the alchemists’ opinions. The projected strain on the subject was of course immense, as would be inevitable when it came to subsuming the vitality of a much greater existence. The solution was corrosive enough to dissolve someone alive in minutes, the paralytic shock of contact with Eisengeist’s blood dooming anyone without the requisite tolerance. She balked at the quantity of alkasnail alkahest involved, far beyond what would be necessary to dissolve and bind the components, clearly intended to help break down the body on some level. The herbal component wasn’t any gentler. Just one of the herbs was potent enough to kill with a slight overdose, let alone all together. Even with Zel’s absurd toxicity tolerance, Zefaris really hoped the dosages had been dialed in for Zelsys specifically ahead of time. The rational part of her knew this to be the case, but it was not wholly in control at this moment.
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Inevitably, she had no choice but to trust Zel’s judgment and wait until things had run their course.
And so, days passed.
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Floating in warm, dark nothingness.
Or so it went.
In the boundless realm of mind, Zelsys found no oblivion.
Fight. Modify. Repeat. Fight. Modify. Repeat. Fight. Modify. Repeat.
A constant cycle of simulation and adjustment, vast tracts of dream-time passing with each real-time hour.
An army of dragon-beasts besieged her mental realm, and with each iteration, both they and her thought-form grew stronger. Were it only so easy as expelling the Third Truthseeker’s incursion. These were real, a representation of the actual bodily struggle taking place each time she subsumed a plume of Eisengeist’s essence.
It was the only way she could distract herself. The physical pain was nothing, but the spiritual strain was a whole other matter. The Primordial Self had turned her aura inward, wielding it as a tool of self-modification in concert with the bath, which she had allowed to flood into her lungs and both stomachs. With every passing hour, Zelsys broke down and rebuilt something of herself, incorporating the vitality of a Sapdragon, a being that was part dragon descendant, part cultivator-beast, and part immortal tree. With each reconstruction, the Primordial Self took the opportunity to instill even further change, dredging up the elements of ancient man that had faded away in the absence of the pressures which demanded them.
Bit by bit, Zelsys remade herself in her own image, pushing a bit closer to the ever-ascending ideal which she hoped never to reach.
Slowly, her nerves and silver conduits began drifting together, intertwining at points.
Her skin split open as she grew, instantaneously healing into tiger-like stripes of untanned, light brown. Even her right arm was not spared this fate, lines of shiny bronze showing through.
In the dream-desert, cornered by an enormous draconic manifestation, the Thinking Self merged with Fulguris and together tore the great beast to pieces. One by one, her nails fell off, extremities reforming to accommodate hooked, retractable claws. Not merely the ends of her digits, but her hands and feet both took a half-step towards ancient man, becoming more suited to her already animalistic tendencies in combat.
Both sculptor and the clay, Zelsys continued to change for as long as her aura and the bath solution held out.
She emerged one day prior to the planned date of emergence. Her eyes shot open, and with a single continuous motion, she rose out of the water. A waterfall of tarry liquid poured forth from her mouth into an empty alkahest jar, expelled by force of aura alone.
The day passed without a word to the outside world.
Zelsys spent it doing two things.
The first entailed becoming accustomed to her own skin all over again. It was one thing to wear it in the realm of mind, and another to do so in physical reality. As the hours passed, she came to the conclusion that just one day would not be enough. Even still, she had never felt better. It felt, somehow, as if the gap separating her sense of self from her physical body had thinned out into translucent gossamer. Her Thundergods felt exceedingly easy to manifest, so much so that she quickly forgot she was even doing it.
The second was reading what she had written during her epiphany. She remembered most of it, but nonetheless wanted to go back to inspect her work with a clear head.